Tag: game development

I think I’ll start this Arbor game by making a prototype. I’ll just try to make one branch with a leaf that you can click and drag. You draw a curvy line while you’re dragging. After you release the drag, the branch will grow to the shape of your line.

That bit is the only part of the design that seems difficult. If I can get that done, the rest won’t be too much of a challenge, besides making it look nice, of course. That’s always the most frustrating part.

On a micro level, you grow the roots and branches by pulling on leaves (on the branches) or little nubbins (on the roots). The longer a branch is, the more nutrients it collects, and the more water it uses. The longer a root is, the more water it collects, and the more nutrients it uses.

There are two ways to lose:

The tree runs out of either nutrients or water. Go too long without nutrients or water and the tree dies.

The tree falls over. Does a tree falling make a sound if no one is there too hear it? If you put too many branches or roots on one side, you’ll find out.

You have a score that is based solely on how big the tree is. Just try to grow the biggest tree you can. You win by getting a high score and then bragging about it on a social network of your choice 😉

The game will be very slow paced, but hopefully still challenging. I imagine it being kind of like Eufloria.

You can grow the tree any way you like. Make it tall, make it wide, make it gnarled and twisty, make it look like a Squirtle, whatever. Once you have something cool, you can take a nice picture of it and share it.

I might make something bad happen if you have more nutrient or water than your tree can handle, not sure yet. I kind of like how simple it is now.

I’m going to be updating it frequently while the competition is going. When I do I’ll write about it here. I still need to do a big writeup on the design of the game. I’ll get around to it. My priority right now though, is working on the game itself.

Haxe is a write once compile everywhere (some might say “debug everywhere”) language and NME is a Flash-like library for drawing graphics with Haxe. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I like it. The language has some nice features that make it very familiar to me.

For my 2012 Github Game-Off game I’m using Haxe and NME. I ran into a problem while trying to fade a rectangle from one color to another. After asking a quick question on haxelang got an answer. Here’s how to fix it.

If you’re using the HTML5 target, you might notice that you can’t use Actuate.transform() to change the color of a sprite. That’s because the canvas renderer that NME uses, Jeash, hasn’t implemented it yet, dang. Here’s what I did instead.

You may notice that I never graphics.clear()’d the original box. That is so the new box color will fade in smoothly over the old box color. If I cleared the old box first, you’d see it disappear and then the new box would fade in.

Yes, now I have two rectangles instead of one. Unfortunately, that takes memory. I hope Jeash implements Actuate.transform() soon.

Webscript.io was apparently just released this morning. It looks pretty awesome. Basically, you write a script in Lua, put it on their server, and they give you a nice friendly URL to access the script. It could be very useful.

If you go the free route your script and data get wiped after 7 days. To have them host it indefinitely it’s about $5 a month.